New Delhi: Raj Kumar Goyal was sworn in as the Chief Information Commissioner on Monday, filling the vacancy at the helm of the Central Information Commission. President Droupadi Murmu administered the oath of office and secrecy at a ceremony held at Rashtrapati Bhavan.
The event was attended by Vice President C P Radhakrishnan and Union Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh, among others.
A 1990-batch retired Indian Administrative Service officer of the Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram, Union Territories cadre, Goyal superannuated on August 31 as Secretary in the Department of Justice under the Ministry of Law and Justice. During his career, he also served as Secretary, Border Management in the Ministry of Home Affairs and held several key assignments at the Centre and in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The post of Chief Information Commissioner had fallen vacant after Heeralal Samariya demitted office on September 13 on attaining the age of 65. Since then, the commission had been functioning with only two Information Commissioners, Anandi Ramalingam and Vinod Kumar Tiwari, while eight posts of Information Commissioners had remained vacant since November 2023.
This appointment, along with the induction of eight Information Commissioners, will bring the Central Information Commission to full strength for the first time in nearly seven years. The commission is mandated to have a Chief Information Commissioner and up to 10 Information Commissioners.
Goyal’s appointment was recommended by a three-member selection committee headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi as members. The panel met on Wednesday to finalise the names of the Chief Information Commissioner, eight Information Commissioners, and a Vigilance Commissioner. Rahul Gandhi registered his dissent during the deliberations, sources said, which was later rebutted by the government.
Sources said those selected as Information Commissioners include former Indian Forest Service officer Khushwant Singh Sethi, former IPS officer Swagat Das, who served in the Home Ministry and the Intelligence Bureau, senior journalist P R Ramesh, Surendra Singh Meena, Ashutosh Chaturvedi, and Sanjeev Kumar Jindal.
BI Bureau
